Perhaps at one time, they did serve the interests of their members by organizing shooting sports and teaching gun safety. But now their members are corporations, many of them foreign, and they work tirelessly to ensure that there are absolutely no controls and regulations on firearm distribution and availability. The goal is to ensure ever-increasing gun sales by constantly introducing new models and creating demand for them.

Firearms are very durable items. They last a lifetime, and can be passed from father to son. A quality firearm design does not soon become obsolete–the .45 Auto is a century old and still highly prized by shooters. The only way for the industry to become an ever-growing and constantly expanding business is to increase demand by constantly creating a need among consumers

The way to do this is with fear, by seeing to it that guns are available to criminals (by the sheer number of them in society) and that this criminal use is matched by the paranoia of non-criminal users seeking to defend themselves. Whether or not this paranoia is justified is irrelevant, the point is to increase sales, growth and profits for the seller.

But even this tactic has pretty much saturated the market. If you are defending your home from an intruder, you will only be able to wield one gun at a time, regardless of how many you own. The new strategy is to create a meme of political tyranny and foreign invasion, and brave patriots combating it, of resourceful survivalists navigating post-apocalyptic chaos. Its like selling big V-8 muscle cars to middle age suburban boy-men. The economics is tied in with the psychology–and penis size.

I like guns, I like to play with them too as I’ll be the first to admit; but I understand why I do and I don’t let it control my life, or mold my thinking. I don’t need Communist invaders, ghetto thugs or black helicopters to justify my hobbies.

The NRA is a very evil organization. They are arms merchants, gun runners, mercenaries. They sell to both sides in a conflict, and are not picky about creating conflicts where none exist. In the past their kind sold repeating rifles to the Indians, knowing it was good for business in the long run. Now its AKs and ARs. They have blood on their hands, they are the Masters of War. Not even god could forgive what they do.

The dawn is red, all right.

And I have guns to this day, including the poorest excuse for a gun I’ve seen. Miserable little 9mm semi-auto that does sling lead and go “bang”.

I don’t think that anyone objects to folks like you and me. I think we object to folks that want guns which have no legitimate purpose, and folks who are unstable having any kind of gun.

The idea of roving bands of morons trying to get your stuff in a disaster is BS. In Britain during the blitz the folks in nearby bomb shelters invited the survivors in. There wasn’t any need for a gun. I think that’s far more common than mowing down anyone other than one’s own family.

It’s unfortunate that normal gun owners get lumped in with gang members, psychopaths and the mentally ill. The NRA does that, has created an organization which doesn’t represent your interests or my interests but allies us with the worst society has to offer. The ignorant and the arrogant benefit most from what the NRA supports.

Frankly, I haven’t seen a gun law yet which would affect me or you. I don’t want automatic weapons. I’m not afraid of background checks.

The NRA doesn’t represent you. Folks like you are safe, as are your guns.

But that’s another story. I got the Marlin (Model 783, iron sights, bolt action, .22 WMR, tube-fed, 12+1 rounds) because I was interested in getting into hunting, and that caliber is legal for wild turkey in Penn’s Woods. As it turns out, I never got around to hunting, but I still shoot it occasionally for target practice. I figure it will keep me fed after the apocalypse, and it is marginal for a combat weapon up to about 100 yds. I always keep a couple of hundred rounds around for a rainy day.

Mine doesn’t have a scope.

It doesn’t help that all (and I do mean 100%) of the visible members of the gun culture seem to be vocally rightwing. You guys have deeply alienated us liberals by imposing a property settlement in our cultural divorce in which you’ve taken “the gun culture” and religion, and awarded science to us. Which, now that I think about it, is actually a pretty good deal. But for the sake of argument let’s continue to pretend that it’s probably bad for our society to be fractured along those particular lines.

I think we need better terminology than “gun culture”, at least insofar as it does a disservice to the responsible gun-owning unicorns who really are in it for the smell of the machine oil and the satisfaction of a steady hand and a steely gaze on the gun range. I know you’re one of the latter group of presumably Good Guys With Guns, so what term would you use for your faction to distinguish it from the dangerous whackos?

In a related story, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s disrespectful to call jackasses like the tea baggers and the religious right “conservatives”. They’re reactionaries, plain and simple, and should be addressed as such.

Words are important, and proper terminology brings greater clarity. Perhaps even peace.

That out of the way, we were both kids in the mid 20th century, and toys were pretty much the same everywhere and hadn’t changed substantially for decades. I remember cap guns, cheap sheet metal stamped out by the millions for us boys in our cowboy suits. I don’t remember soldier uniforms on kids ever being popular…maybe it wasn’t all a plan to train us to grow up and fight with guns. I also remember how some us figured out how to make IEDs from a roll of caps by stacking the caps in that zigzag pattern like when you’re idly folding a soda straw wrapper, aligning the powder spots on each into one big column you’d then smack with a hammer to make a big bang. Boys love loud noises and bad smells, and gunpowder rewards us with both. Course, every once in a while there’d be a report of some kid taking the idea to foolishly epic proportions causing injury and property damage and once in a long while, death (a hammer brought down on a big pile of small packets of gunpowder can end up embedded in a young forehead). But toy gun caps don’t kill, kids kill.

But I digress. I also had a couple of BB guns (liked the .45 pistol best, because I have a congenital problem with my right eye that makes it really hard for me [a right-hander] to hold a rifle and sight along it), occasionally shot my Dad’s .22 rifle “for sport”. Played around with mixing up all kinds of home-brew explosives and fireworks.

I grew out of it, but some guys (seems to be almost exclusively guys) don’t. Lots of people continue skateboarding into their 30s. Go figure. I really want a society that accommodates both kinds and the whole gamut of other eccentricities and quirks of my fellow human…as long as those quirks don’t end up killing or maiming other people. That’s all I really want.

In my opinion, the “gun culture” came about for a number of reasons,

0) For historical reasons (Indian attacks, slave rebellions, lawlessness on a sparsely populated frontier), guns have always been common in rural America, also mostly as farm tools in wilderness areas, and Americans living in those areas were relatively more prosperous than their overseas counterparts. They could afford them.

1) Due to mass production, guns eventually became cheaper, relative to the purchasing power of the average consumer, and easier to operate.

2) The use of guns in street crime became much more prevalent, especially in the urban drug trade. This not only increased the demand for firearms among criminals, but also among people who felt threatened by criminals. This especially became the case when the poor started arming themselves.

3) The increased use of guns by both criminals and ordinary citizens led to a gun industry developing. There used to be just a few popular firearms for the sport and self-defense markets, but now we had an industry, both domestic manufacturers and importers, and an expanding market interested in promoting exotic self-defense weapons (new calibers, novel designs, etc) as well as paramilitary type weapons suitable for combat use. Guns last a long time if taken care of, keeping sales booming requires marketing. If you don’t believe this, go to your local newsstand and see how many shooting-related magazines there are.

4) A gun industry meant competition and new products, plus industry associations promoting gun-friendly laws and organizing against any form of gun control and regulation.

5) With manufacturers trying to sell more guns, trade groups lobbying on their behalf, paranoid citizens terrified of the increase in weapons, paranoid gun owners terrified that someone was going to take their guns away, a self-perpetuating spiral of gun hysteria took off. It started feeding on itself.

6) Eventually, this positive feedback loop became politicized, with particular feelings about gun use and ownership becoming associated with particular ideological positions. Some people felt that guns could be simply outlawed, and the problem would just go away. That is nonsense, of course. They would still smuggle them into the country inside bales of marijuana. Besides, there are already probably more guns in the country than there are people, and firearms are a very durable piece of hardware.

Other people somehow managed to convince themselves that ownership of firearms would somehow prevent a tyrannical government from taking over. That is also ludicrous. In Saddam’s Iraq, everybody owned a gun, And contrary to most right wing propaganda, the first thing Communist governments do is get everybody into the state militia, and issue them not only a gun, but military training. People need a reason to justify purchases of not only a sporting or self-defense weapon, but multiple assault rifles, advanced sidearms, and other diverse combat accessories. Its the same psychosis that drives preppers, survivalists, militias, and people who are gearing up for the Zombies Apocalypse. (Do you think I’m kidding? Google “Zombie Apocalypse Survival Gear”. There’s a whole industry of specialized weaponry already available.) No, when people want an excuse to do something really stupid, they can be quite creative.

So to answer your question, what can be done to put a stop to this nonsense? Probably not much, except passing a few common sense laws limiting the distribution and types of weapons, to try and control the damage as much as possible. For starters, I would make it illegal for people to carry or keep firearms outside their property, except for authorized use at gun ranges, hunting parks or transport to a gunsmith’s. Other than that, we’re just going to have to wait until the crazyness works itself out.